Engadget – We requested our personal information from dozens of companies. Here’s what they gave us — and what they didn’t: “The average American, one study tell us, touches their phone 2,600 times per day. By the end of a given year, that’s nearly a million touches, rising to two million if you’re a power user. Each one of those taps, swipes and pulls is a potential proxy for our most intimate behaviors. Our phones are not only tools that help us organize our day but also sophisticated monitoring devices that we voluntarily feed with interactions we think are private. The questions we ask Google, for instance, can be more honest than the ones we ask our loved ones — a “digital truth serum,” as ex-Googler and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Hoover up these data points and combine them with all of our other devices — smart TVs, fitness trackers, cookies that stalk us across the web — and there exists an ambient, ongoing accumulation of our habits to the tune of about 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillion) bytes of data per day. Sometimes that data gets spliced, scattered and consolidated across a web of collaborators, researchers and advertisers. Acxiom, for instance, claims 1,500 data points for each of the 500 million people in its database, including most US adults. Just in the past few months, Facebook was reported to have asked hospitals, including Stanford University School of Medicine, to share and integrate patients’ medical data with its own (the research project has since been put on hold). In April, gay dating app Grindr was revealed to have shared customers’ HIV status with two app-optimization companies. And who suspected completing an online personality test would pave the way for President Donald Trump’s targeted political advertising?…”